


that i want us to live

by robotchangeling



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, spoilers thru winter, this one's sad. you've been warned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-19
Updated: 2018-04-19
Packaged: 2019-04-24 21:58:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14364558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/robotchangeling/pseuds/robotchangeling
Summary: Samot reflects on blades in bodies





	that i want us to live

Sometimes, in dreams, Samot imagined he could see him again. It was a fantasy developed over centuries. In it, Samothes was whole, and wholly himself. Samot would press a kiss to every inch of his form that the blade might have penetrated, would whisper _I’m-sorry_ s and _love-you_ s into each kiss until Samothes would have no choice but to forgive him.

Samot doesn't imagine that much anymore.

Now he is left to wonder about another blade in another body. Terribly different, and achingly the same.

Spring has begun taking Hieron piece by piece, blooming from the blood of his husband and the body of his son. A warm bath for an already feverish continent. Its effects can’t truly be seen, yet, but Samot doubts they will be what its creator intended. Confidence in ingenuity is a dangerous thing when left untempered. 

  
  


“How much will you destroy in trying to save him?” Samothes asked, those thousands of years ago. How much, indeed.

The time the three of them spent together holds a curious place in Samot’s mind. It is strange how a span of so few years can hold so much more than its length. What did Maelgwyn think of those years, when he was no longer himself? Or earlier, when he held his own name and face but tore himself between his warring fathers?

Oh, the two of them had surely destroyed so much, long before any blades were sent for holy bodies. 

  
  


After, once the city was at peace enough to spare him, Samot finally went to Samol. He had planned what he would say, the explanations he would give, but the words left his mind before he could even reach the door. Samol stood on the porch of his home and Samot couldn't move, couldn't speak, couldn't breathe until Samol stepped forward and pulled him close. 

“It wasn't-” Samot began, choking on too many defenses. “I thought-”

Samol quieted him. “I know, boy,” he said, holding him still. “I know.”

Even in the end of things, would it come to this? Samol, patient; Samot, seeking absolution. He didn't find it, not then or there, not for this. But Samol held him as the sobs came and went, and he didn't complain when Samot had to leave far too soon.

  
  


Somewhere, in some way, that place they’d called home may still stand. For a time, Samol had left the house as it was. For when they fought themselves out and returned, he had said. After, when only Samot could have gone home - as if he’d want to, alone - Samol made it his own.

When they last spoke, Samol was disappointed in him, but too tired, too resigned to act on it. That was - well, too many years ago, Samot supposes. There will be time to talk when he is well again. Samol can be angry with him then, if he likes. Samot will relish every word.

  
  


Severea forgave Samot long ago for the slight he did her before he was himself. Oh, yes, they were family for years and years, amidst the fights and power struggles that sometimes came with it. Then came that fateful High Sun Day, and then went Marielda, and she would not forgive him for that. 

“You’ll kill us all,” Severea said when last she spoke to him. Then she left, Galenica beside her, to pursue solutions that will only ever be treatments, never cures. It might have hurt less, Samot thought, if she never saw him as more than the hungry thing that took her name and her life so many millennia ago. 

So it seems this fight may yet cost him even more of his family, if not one way then another. Samot could live with that, he thinks - that’s the key word, there, after all. _Live_. He only wants them to live. 

  
  


There was no grand conspiracy this time, no plan to save existence through terrible, terrible sacrifice. The disciple to rise up against this Samothes wasn’t even the one Samot had warned away from him. Maelgwyn had put too much trust in his followers’ faith, and in himself, not realizing how easily he could be undone. Such a simple mistake, to be his last - so much lost, again, to chance and misjudgements. Though perhaps his bigger error came millennia ago in trusting his own father’s plans.

Which betrayal hurt worse, Samot wonders, to be killed by one’s family or to be made to do the killing? It makes little difference, in the end, when Samothes’ tomb has become his son’s only ten thousand years later. Oh, the hurt matters, but this fight has been a long one. There will surely be more damage done before it can end. Perhaps one day when the world is safe he’ll develop a taste for self-flagellation and fill a book, a shelf, a library with all the ways he’s tried to get there. 

  
  


There’s no time for wallowing in regrets and mistakes, not now, not with so much at stake. Samot knows this, but he permits himself this moment - stretches it out, luxuriates in it - before he must put his grief aside, again. 

The stars will work, must work, and if they don’t, he will find another method. Samot takes a breath, and then another, and continues on. When he closes his eyes he dreams of nothing.

**Author's Note:**

> That sure is a jesus christ superstar title........anyway i'm sad
> 
> Find me on tumblr @littlesocialistrobot & on twitter @robotchangeling


End file.
